Descriptions

American meteorology was synonymous with subjective weather forecasting in the
early twentieth century. Controlled by the Weather Bureau and with no academic
programs of its own, the few hundred extant meteorologists had no standing in the
scientific community. Until the American Meteorological Society was founded in
1919, meteorologists had no professional society. The post-World War I rise of
aeronautics spurred demands for increased meteorological education and training.
The Navy arranged the first graduate program in meteorology in 1928 at MIT. It
was followed by four additional programs in the interwar years. When the U.S.
military found itself short of meteorological support for World War II, a massive
training program created thousands of new mathematics- and physics-savvy
meteorologists. Those remaining in the field after the war had three goals: to create
a mathematics-based theory for meteorology, to create a method for objectively
forecasting the weather, and to professionalize the field. Contemporaneously,
mathematician John von Neumann was preparing to create a new electronic digital
computer which could solve, via numerical analysis, the equations that defined the
atmosphere. Weather Bureau Chief Francis W. Reichelderfer encouraged von
Neumann, with Office of Naval Research funding, to attack the weather forecasting
problem. Assisting with the proposal was eminent Swedish-born meteorologist
Carl-Gustav Rossby. Although Rossby returned to Stockholm to establish his own
research school, he was the de facto head of the Meteorology Project providing
personnel, ideas, and a publication venue. On-site leader Jule Charney provided the
equations and theoretical underpinnings. Scandinavian meteorologists supplied by
Rossby provided atmospheric reality. Six years after the Project began,
meteorologists were ready to move their models from a research to an operational
venue. Attempts by Air Force meteorologist Philip D. Thompson to co-opt
numerical weather prediction (NWP) prompted the academics, Navy, and Weather
Bureau members involved to join forces and guarantee that operational NWP
would remain a joint activity not under the control of any weather service. This is
the story of the professionalization of a scientific community, of significant
differences in national styles in meteorology, and of the fascination (especially by
non-meteorologists) in exploiting NWP for the control of weather.